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WIC clinic opens on Fort Stewart
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Spc. Jeremy Oakes and his wife, Amanda Oakes, attend the Fort Stewart WIC clinics informal opening Thursday with 5-month-old daughter Kianna. (Denise Etheridge)

The new Fort Stewart WIC clinic officially opened its doors last week and is ready to serve an estimated total caseload of 19,000 clients, according to Coastal Health District WIC Coordinator Tonya Scott.

Clinic staff informally celebrated the opening with client families on Thursday, handing out balloons and door prizes.
A formal grand opening was held Friday with area leaders from Fort Stewart, the Coastal Health District and more in attendance.

“This is the fourth largest (WIC clinic) across the Coastal Health District,” Scott said Thursday, adding that the clinic has the highest rate of breastfeeding mothers among its clients.

WIC, which stands for Women, Infants and Children, is a federally funded nutrition-education program. Its mission is to provide supplemental food, nutrition education, social service and health referrals to income-eligible pregnant or postpartum women, infants and children up to age 5 to improve their health. The Coastal Health District serves Liberty, Long, Bryan, Camden, Chatham, Effingham, Glynn and McIntosh counties.

Scott said many soldier fathers often support their spouses and children who participate in WIC at Fort Stewart by coming to appointments with them.

Spc. Jeremy Oakes, 22, and his wife, Amanda Oakes, 19, attended the informal opening with 5-month-old daughter Kianna. Amanda Oakes said she participated in WIC in her home state of New Hampshire while her husband was deployed to Iraq with the 4th Infantry Brigade Combat Team.

“It’s been a big help,” she said. “They give us (young mothers) a lot of encouragement to breastfeed our infants.”

Read more in the Aug. 3 edition of the News.

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Later yall, its been fun
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This is among the last pieces I’ll ever write for the Bryan County News.

Friday is my last day with the paper, and come June 1 I’m headed back to my native Michigan.

I moved here in 2015 from the Great Lake State due to my wife’s job. It’s amicable, but she has since moved on to a different life in a different state, and it’s time for me to do the same.

My son Thomas, an RHHS grad as of Saturday, also is headed back to Michigan to play basketball for a small school near Ann Arbor called Concordia University. My daughter, Erin, is in law school at University of Toledo. She had already begun her college volleyball career at Lourdes University in Ohio when we moved down here and had no desire to leave the Midwest.

With both of them and the rest of my family up north, there’s no reason for me to stay here. I haven’t missed winter one bit, but I’m sure I won’t miss the sand gnats, either.

Shortly after we arrived here in 2015, I got a job in communications with a certain art school in Savannah for a few short months. It was both personally and professionally toxic and I’ll leave it at that.

In March 2016 I signed on with the Bryan County News as assistant editor and I’ve loved every minute of it. My “first” newspaper career, in the late 80s and early 90s, was great. But when I left it to work in politics and later with a free-market think tank, I never pictured myself as an ink-stained wretch again.

Like they say, never say never.

During my time here at the News, I’ve covered everything that came along. That’s one big difference between working for a weekly as opposed to a daily paper. Reporters at a daily paper have a “beat” to cover. At a weekly paper like this, you cover … life. Sports, features, government meetings, crime, fundraisers, parades, festivals, successes, failures and everything in between. Oh, and hurricanes. Two of them. I’ll take a winter blizzard over that any day.

Along the way I’ve met a lot of great people. Volunteers, business owners, pastors, students, athletes, teachers, coaches, co-workers, first responders, veterans, soldiers and yes, even some politicians.

And I learned that the same adrenalin rush from covering “breaking news” that I experienced right out of college is still just as exciting nearly 30 years later.

With as much as I’ve written about the population increase and traffic problems, at least for a few short minutes my departure means there will be one less vehicle clogging up local roads. At least until I pass three or four moving vans headed this way as I get on northbound I-95.

The hub-bub over growth here can be humorous, unintentional and ironic all at once. We often get comments on our Facebook page that go something like this: “I’ve lived here for (usually less than five years) and the growth is out of control! We need a moratorium on new construction.”

It’s like people who move into phase I of “Walden Woods” subdivision after all the trees are cleared out and then complain about trees being cut down for phase II.

Bryan County will always hold a special place in my heart and I definitely plan on visiting again someday. My hope is that my boss, Jeff Whitten (one of the best I’ve ever had), will let me continue to be part of the Pembroke Mafia Football League from afar. If the Corleone family could expand to Vegas, there’s no reason the PMFL can’t expand to Michigan.

But the main reason I want to return someday is about that traffic issue. After all, I’ll need to see it with my own eyes before I’ll believe that Highway 144 actually got widened.

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